(Caius)
I didn't interrupt her thoughts.
She'd spent so much of her life without the space to have them that I wasn't about to fill every silence now.
She walked beside me with her head a little higher than she once had.
Most wolves wouldn't have noticed.
I did.
I'd watched fear slowly become confidence, one day at a time.
It hadn't happened because I'd rescued her.
It had happened because she'd chosen, over and over again, to keep moving forward despite everything that had been done to her.
I couldn't have been more proud of her if I'd tried.
I thought about the woman she'd become.
Not different from the one I'd found in Ashcrest.
Just free to be herself.
There was an important difference between those things.
Ashcrest hadn't created her strength. It had only tried to bury i
